The UN ‘secret directive’ on Syria was published by Russian newspaper Kommersant on Sunday. The two-page document, dated October 2017, lays out the framework for “all UN actors” operating in Syria “to ensure support and assistance is provided to those in need in all areas of Syria.”

According to the leaked file, the UN “would be ready to facilitate reconstruction” in Syria only once there is “a genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties.” This phrase is highlighted in the text.

Concerns about the UN tying its assistance in post-war reconstruction to the political process in Syria were previously raised by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Speaking at a press event two weeks ago, Lavrov said that a “secret directive,” banning UN agencies from participating Syria’s economic recovery, was distributed by the UN Secretariat last October.

The Russian minister explained that he first suspected that such a directive may exist within the UN after UNESCO had rejected Moscow’s appeal for help in restoring partially destroyed World Heritage sites in the ravaged ancient city of Palmyra.

According to Kommersant’s own sources, the leaked document was originally written by former US diplomat Jeffrey Feltman, who is now serving as UN under-secretary-general for political affairs. The UN, meanwhile, had denied that such a document ever existed. “There was no ‘secret directive’ issued by any department at the UN,” Stephane Dujarric, the secretary-general’s spokesperson, told TASS news agency at the time.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/437444-leaked-un-directive-syria/

From CJ Hopkins

The latest “Trump Deathwatch” began on Tuesday, August 21, 2018. It began in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, when Paul Manafort, sleazebag beltway operator and former chairman of Trump’s campaign, was pronounced guilty by a jury of his peers on ten counts of various types of fraud — tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to disclose thirty-one foreign bank accounts which he was using for the purposes of fraud. Or maybe it began in another courtroom, this one miles away in New York City, when, almost at the exact same moment, Michael Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight unrelated charges of fraud and campaign finance violations, the latter charges stemming from “hush money” paid to two of Trump’s former bimbos.

In any event, whichever came first, it began with these two sleazebag characters, both of whom had been indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is doggedly investigating allegations that the President of the United States is a devious Russian intelligence asset personally planted in the Oval Office by Vladimir Putin, the Russian mob, and a conspiracy of crackerjack “cyber-influencers,” who brainwashed millions of American voters into betraying Hillary Clinton, and the nation, with a bunch of emails and some Facebook posts, and who are even now waging “a chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy.”

Mueller, who had previously indicted thirteen Russian “cyber-influencers” who he was certain would never appear in court to laugh derisively in his face, needed to put a “win” on the board, and he needed to do it before the midterm elections. The Resistance® and the corporate media have been desperate for something juicy that they can relentlessly milk for the next ten weeks. They need the Democrats to take the House so they can pretend to try to impeach Trump, or at least subpoena a buttload of folks to appear before a series of congressional hearings that they can drag out all the way to 2020. Naturally, they were hoping Mueller would deliver someone even vaguely connected to their ridiculous, James Bondian “Russiagate” narrative, but Cohen and Manafort were the best he could do, so they went ahead and made the most of it.

Television networks interrupted programming. Most of them did that split-screen thing. News readers broke out their “serious” voices. Legal “experts” were rushed into studios to nod their heads and agree that this was “very serious,” or “extremely serious,” or “potentially extremely serious,” or, in any event, “very, very bad for Trump.” The press, who were still recuperating from the exertion of  their synchronized attack on Trump for attacking them for attacking him day after day for the last two years in an only marginally less synchronized manner, instantly went into full Trump attack mode.

The Guardian immediately went to live, moment-by-moment “Trump Deathwatch” coverage. Their opinionists started pumping out pieces proclaiming that “Trump’s reckoning has finally arrived,” and demanding he be impeached before “the cancer on his presidency” metastasizes. The New York Times Editorial Board (which is obviously getting a bit fed up with the riff-raff questioning its journalistic integrity) announced that, starting from that very moment, anyone doubting that Donald Trump is a dirty, rotten, Russian agent is a “fantasist” and a member of his “cult.” CNN began babbling about impeachment, as did the BBC, and more or less every organ of the corporate media.

The Washington Post Editorial Board authored a rather lengthy example of the speech that “a presidential president” would deliver in Trump’s circumstances (which she wouldn’t be in), confessing that the Russians have “attacked our democracy,” and that we’re under “ongoing assault” by the Kremlin, and welcoming special counsel Mueller’s further indictments of this “presidential” president’s inner circle of sleazebag operators, dirty tricks specialists, PR hacks, corporate lobbyists, and political consultants (which, of course, this “presidential” president wouldn’t have … well, except for sleazebags like David Brock, secret agent Christopher Steele, Marc Elias, of the law firm Perkins Coie, Jeremy Bash and Philippe Reines, of Beacon Global Strategies, LLC, “a unique Washington consulting firm,” and innumerable other distinguished sleazebags).

By the morning of Saturday, August 25, this latest “Trump Deathwatch” (like those that have preceded it) had been cancelled due to declining ratings. The corporate media started running those features reminding Americans how difficult it is to impeach, or otherwise remove from office, a treasonous Russian intelligence asset who is openly working with Vladimir Putin to destroy America, and Western civilization, and establish a global fascist dictatorship ruled by Putin, Trump, Corbyn, that Italian bozo, and Bashar al-Assad. The corporate media run these features in the wake of every “Trump Deathwatch” episode to taper liberals off the effects of the mindless hysteria they have just finished generating.

Which, in this case, that turned out to be unnecessary, as liberals and other Trump obsessives, who by now are used to having The Resistance® whip them up into these gibbering fits over Russians or Nazis on a regular basis, were already onto the next big story. On the Wednesday after “the worst day of his presidency,” Trump (perhaps on Putin’s orders) had tweeted about “white South African farmers,” which had set off yet another round of global denunciation of racism, white supremacy, Nazis, and so on. Trump, who either is a master manipulator or has the attention span of a chihuahua, or both (and yes, folks, I’m afraid that’s possible), had seen something on  the White Genocide Channel that he felt he needed to share with the world (or use to force the corporate media to switch back from the Russia hysteria to the Nazi hysteria they’d been relentlessly flogging until the Manafort conviction and Cohen plea deal allowed them to switch back to the Russia hysteria they’d been relentlessly flogging since the Traitor Summit).

And on and on, and on, it goes … and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it. Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack Russia’s ally in the Middle East. So, probably, no attack on Iran.

Which means we are in for another two years of alternating Russia and Nazi hysteria, mostly on a low-intensity basis, with the occasional new segment of “Trump Deathwatch” thrown in. Personally, I’m rooting for the Democrats to take control of the House in the midterms, purely for the sake of entertainment. After calling this ass clown a Russian spy and Literal Hitler for the last two years, they’re going have to at least pretend to impeach him, or else stage a series of internationally-televised neo-McCarthyite congressional hearings to root out the diabolical networks of Putin-Nazis that have infested America, and Britannia, and the rest of the West.

That’s the main thing, after all. Yes, the corporatist ruling classes need to make an example of Trump to dissuade any future billionaire ass clowns from running for high office without their permission, but even more so, they need to put down the “populist” opposition to the spread of global capitalism and the gradual phase-out of national sovereignty that began with Brexit and continued with Trump, so they can transform the smoldering remains of the Earth into one big happy neoliberal market run by supranational corporations and the “democratic governments” they have bought and paid for … which, by that time, folks won’t even notice because we’ll all be shuffling around like zombies staring down into the screens of our phones.

Damn, I think I may have gone and opened a rather enormous can of leftist worms right at the end of this essay by mentioning the “national sovereignty” thing. So, leftists, please ignore the previous paragraph. National sovereignty is the same as nationalism. Nationalism is very, very bad. Internationalism is good. Internationalist socialism is what we all want. Okay, admittedly, the forces of internationalist socialism appear to be … well, somewhat marginal at the moment (or possibly virtually non-existent), but that’s not a problem, because the global capitalists will be happy to internationalize everything for us, and to do away with all those nasty nationalists, and that national government-subsidized healthcare and university education and all that stuff.

So let’s forget that I mentioned national sovereignty, because that’s all Putinist Trumpism, and so on. There’s absolutely no reason at all for leftists to discuss that subject, or to view it in any kind of larger historical or geopolitical context or anything. Once the global corporate empire finishes their Privatization of Everything, I’m sure they will be open to considering socialism. They’ll probably even let us vote on it. By then, they will have cleansed the Internet of all the discord-sowing Putin-Nazis … so there won’t be any danger of being “influenced” to vote the wrong way or anything.

In the meantime, don’t forget to do your part in the War on Trump, Putin, Assad, Corbyn, and whoever else the corporate media tell us we’re at war against. Forget about global capitalism. Keep obsessing about Donald Trump. And if you get tired of obsessing about Donald Trump, you can always call Corbyn an anti-Semite, or accuse Glenn Greenwald of working for Putin, or, if you’ve got some free time and want to get creative, compile a Directory of International Assadists, or some other paranoid pseudo-blacklist. Every little contribution counts!

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/09/02/trump-deathwatch/

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DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Ischinger, was there a single moment when you realized that the old world order was slipping?

Ischinger: Absolutely. It was in February 2007, the year before I took over the chairmanship of the Munich Security Conference. Vladimir Putin was speaking in Munich and in an extremely aggressive tone, he called into question the U.S. claim to leadership. I was sitting in the audience and, behind me, a journalist said: This is going to change the world. It was a turning point, the beginning of something new.

DER SPIEGEL: Was that clear to you at the time?

Ischinger: We didn't take it seriously enough. I'm not excluding myself. We tried to ignore the war in Georgia in 2008 and essentially tried to deny reality until March 2014, until the annexation of Crimea. Then, it wasn't possible any longer.

DER SPIEGEL: "The World in Danger" ("Welt in Gefahr") is the title of your new book. How bad is the situation?

Ischinger: We are experiencing an epochal shift. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation has never been as dangerous as it is today. Primarily because mutual trust has vanished. We can only see the rough outlines of what the new political age will look like. There is Russia's new role, China's expansion, violent conflicts around the world such as the war in Syria, the consequences of which we in Europe have particularly felt. A once reliable partner like Turkey is faltering, and we have experienced significant instability even within the European Union. But no politician has unsettled the world to the degree Donald Trump has. Since he entered office in January 2017, the entire liberal world order seems to be in danger.

DER SPIEGEL: Why are these disruptions to global politics taking place now?

Ischinger: There are many reasons. America's unipolar hegemony after 1990 is approaching its end and China is rising at the same time. That begs the question: Who will guarantee the erstwhile global order once the U.S. is no longer prepared to do so? Relations between Russia and the West are extremely strained. In this new world, prognostications regarding what will happen next have become much more difficult to make. Uncertainty and uneasiness characterize the global political situation.

DER SPIEGEL: Is Trump destroying the West with his rhetoric?

Ischinger: If it were only actions that mattered in foreign policy, I would be more sanguine. Because the U.S. is still doing more for NATO than all the rest of us put together. Unfortunately, the current situation isn't the only thing that matters. Words do too. And Trump's words act like poison to the cohesion of the West. The West needs a symbol, and that is what we have lost under Trump. And because we Germans finally became embedded in the West after a long journey over the last 70 years, it is a particularly painful loss, almost a loss of identity - much worse than for the French or the British.

Read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/wolfgang-ischinger-we-are-expieriencing-an-epochal-shift-a-.html

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First things first: Russia could not abandon Ossetia which was being "attacked" by Georgia. Ossetia as part of the USSR is mostly populated by Russians.

Second: Ukraine was part of the USSR until the early 1990s. A deal had been made between Reagan and Gorbachev that as the USSR was "dismantling itself", the West, especially the US would not try touch former USSR countries. But true to word, the USA, with media and a few billion dollars, basically fomented a "Nazi" revolution in Ukraine to oust the elected government. Crimea was not "annexed" by Russia. Crimea was a USSR gift from Kroutchev to Ukraine 50 years ago. Crimea, like Scotland is populated by Scots, is populated by Russian people. The Russians have a Russian port in Crimea "that they subleased from Ukraine to give it some cash". When Ukraine turned on the Russians with the help of the West contrary to the Reagan/Gorbachev agreement, the Crimean Russians did not want anything to do with Ukraine. They had a referendum, in the same class as the Scots voted to stay in the UK or not. The Crimeans voted to REJOIN Russia. No "annexation" here.

Trump is shaking the illusion of comfort enjoyed by the Europeans who, to say the least, have been lazying about in forming their Union. At twice the population of the USA, Europe should be able to enjoy the status of being more powerful than the USA. Nupe... They have been cleverly "divided" by the USA — and the "refugee" problem is one of these more discreet clever acts from the USA: create wars in Africa and in the Middle East and bob's your uncle...

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...

The idea that regiments of the Schutzstaffel were fighting purely for Estonian and Latvian independence is a horrifying fabrication in defiance of the overwhelming evidence documented by holocaust historians. The West has exploited this sanitizing of history that reappeared following the reinstatement of free enterprise in eastern Europe which has proliferated the far right in the EU as a whole. Why? It serves their cynical immediate interests in undermining Moscow. The same manipulations are occurring in the Cold War’s sequel. Last year, NATO even produced a short film and a-historical reenactment entitled Forest Brothers: Fight for the Baltics, glorifying the anti-Soviet partisans as part of its propaganda effort against Russia.

Any crimes that were committed by the Soviet NKVD during the war are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Jews and Roma which were exterminated on an industrial level by the Nazis and their co-conspirators using the race theory — there is no comparison. Not to mention that the reintroduction of the free market to Eastern Europe killed more people than any period in Soviet history, reducing life expectancy by a decade and undoing seventy years worth of progress. We only ever hear of the faults of socialism and the inflated numbers of losses of life attributed to its failure, never the daily crimes of capitalism or the tens of millions lost in the wars it produces.

The Soviet brand of socialism was far from perfect, but nevertheless a model for what humanity can achieve in the face of tremendous adversity without being shackled by the contradictions of capitalism — an industrial society with relative equality in education, wealth, employment and basic necessities. Now that Western capitalism is once again collapsing, it is making friends with nationalists to revise its ugly history and the Russian minority in the Baltics are suffering the consequence. It will continue to apportion blame on the up-and-coming power in Moscow, no longer the quasi-colony of the Yeltsin era, for its soon-to-be expiration. Let us hope it does not start another World War in the midst of it — for all our sake.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/09/07/the-russian-minority-in-the-baltics-...

Western capitalism is far from collapsing. We won't know that Western capitalism has collapsed until it has (2032 ±5). It will be sudden, with few markers ahead. Presently, it is being upgraded, adapted, re-tooled to populism via pseudo-fascist tendencies, including Trumpo-fiddle-ism: grab more, share less. It won't make any difference.

The main thingster that will "collapse" Western capitalism is global warming. This is why many denialists of gobal warming accuse global warming of being a communist plot. But this is also why many Western capitalist countries have adopted wind mills and solar panels as a solution to carbon neutral energy supplies, and are counting their "carbon footprint" pennies, because they known it's warming up.

As it stands, present capitalism is not planetary sustainable. We only make Western capitalism succeed by discounting a lot of side-effects in the equation. WC (Western capitalism — not water closet, though it's like a sanitised version of such — clean toilet seat, all shit down the pipe) is a bit like taking a soothing medicine for a headache that will destroy your kidneys. And it will.

Population demands in growth and comforts are not sustainable even with the best management of resources. The world is still on track to pump an extra 3 ppm of CO2 per year, through transport, food production and land clearing (stupid management of land — especially in Australia).

There will be an intersection of degradation (including global warming — (especially global warming), plus plasticocracy, toxicocracy and othercrazycracies) plus growth (the laws of too large numbers) at which our activities will become inevitably too destructive. This has been explored in various articles on this site especially here:

With the bloody change of government to the near-extreme right in Australia, this is not going to improve the situation or give us a better chance to weather the oncoming problems. We have to turf out ScoMo and his idiots as soon as possible.

On this score, most of the nations on the planet are arming themselves in preparation for conflicts rather than cooperation. Nothing new here, except the present firepower is far more than a couple of guns and arrows...

Our media are at best being ignorant of this situation, are lying and are blaming "the other", using fake flag events such as the Skripals to stir the "anti-other" sentiments. But most of our media are also distracting us for essential understanding of our failures, with inane entertainment, because, as even some of our best people say, we are tired of bad news and we need a good laugh while we still can...

At this level too, collectivism should not be the destruction of individualism, but a realisation that we have to find collective efficient solutions to the oncoming problems, some of which are already at our doorsteps. This won't prevent the onslaught though, but it will give humanity and other species a better chance of survival on this limited environment we call Earth.

It's our call.

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